Revolutionary Historians vs. Revolutionary Americans

• Historians disagree with one another frequently about the past, which is to be expected. But historians also disagree with the people they study, shining a light on a key challenge in historical research – the credibility of contemporaries’ eye-witness testimony versus historians’ expert-witness testimony. Who is a more reliable guide to events of the past – the people who witnessed the events firsthand, or even participated in them directly, or the historians who try to recover the past centuries after the fact? This essay examines the ways in which Revolutionary historians are at odds with Revolutionary Americans regarding central aspects of the Revolution: why Americans rebelled, who fought in the war, who won the war, and when the war ended. These disagreements pit the historians’ superior knowledge about the war against the rebels’ actual experience of the war.

  
  

Even though the American secession from the British Empire took place 250 years ago, it is still a live issue today. The American Revolution plays a central role in debates Americans have today about big national issues like gun control and gay marriage, as well as small local issues like which books will be taught in the local school. Efforts to shape public opinion and public policy in the United States often begin with a retelling of the country’s birth, because the American Revolution is the cornerstone of Americans’ collective understanding of what kind of country the United States is.

In 2019, for example, The New York Times sparked public controversy with “The 1619 Project,” a series of essays that offered a race-themed narrative of the American founding. These essays were not esoteric history lessons about the past, however. They instead guided readers to see racism as pervasive in American life in the present, and to thus shape public policy to root out racism, white supremacy, and “systemic racism.” The 1619 Project later evolved into an educational curriculum for American schools, museums, and public libraries, with the same goal of shaping public opinion and public policy.

The most famous example of retelling the story of the American Revolution to shape opinion and policy in the present took place in 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War. When the Southern states seceded, the newly-elected president of the Southern Confederacy (Jefferson Davis) offered a history lesson about the American Revolution in his inaugural address. This historical account of the Revolution explained that secession was Constitutional, legitimate, and peaceful, and that Northerners should therefore accept it as such. Later, when Abraham Lincoln was sworn into office as the newly-elected president of the United States, he too offered a history lesson about the Revolution in his own inaugural address. Lincoln’s history lesson explained that secession was unconstitutional, illegitimate, and insurrectionary, and that the Southern states should therefore return to the Union.

During that deadly war, both sides continued to retell Southern and Northern audiences about the American Revolution, connecting the cause of the Civil War to the cause of the Revolution. In Lincoln’s most famous wartime speech – the Gettysburg Address – he offered another history lesson about the Revolution, ending with a challenge to his generation of Americans to vindicate, with military victory, what he presented as the core cause of the Revolutionary generation.

Americans are still exposed to such history lessons today, not only during election campaigns – national, state, and local – but also on a daily basis, in coverage and analysis of domestic and international politics. Americans’ interest in what historians have to say about the Revolution can be charted also in the number of books, documentaries, and dramatic productions on the Revolution, which grows decade by decade. By all metrics, Americans think they need to know what historians have to say about the Revolution to understand current events in America – from guns, abortion, religion, and free speech, to taxes, immigration, global warming, and race relations.

Because the American Revolution remains so important to Americans, Revolutionary history is quite volatile, with the historical judgement about the Revolution shifting generation by generation. It is hardly problematic that historical opinion evolves over time. As every generation of historians uncovers new information, or looks at things from a different perspective, scholars come to new conclusions. It is disconcerting, however, to observe historians disagreeing with the people they study. History consumers find themselves in a difficult position when Revolutionary Americans said one thing about their Revolution, and Revolutionary historians say something else. In such instances, readers and students struggle to understand why they should trust the historian over the people who were there. Who is more credible on the events of the past – the eye-witnesses and participants who were there, or the historians trying to recover the past from a distance of two or three centuries?

Among the many questions on which Revolutionary historians dismiss the eye-witness testimony of Revolutionary Americans, three are particularly central to understanding the meaning and purpose of the Revolution:

·   Who fought the war – a radical minority or a mainstream majority?

·   Who won the war – the state militias or the national army?

·   When did the Revolution end – were the Revolution’s objectives realized in 1783 or 1787?

Who fought the war – a radical minority or a mainstream majority?

At the time of the Revolution, Americans believed they had won the war on the strength of overwhelming public support for the American cause throughout the 13 rebellious colonies. In the 20^th century, however, most historians came to believe the opposite – that only 20-30 percent of Americans supported the Revolution. These historians came to believe that the Patriots were a loud a radical fringe that was fixated on British imperial policies, and that most Americans were either disengaged or unsupportive of the Patriot faction. Consequently, American historians came to understand the American response to Britain’s imperial reforms and imperial taxes – raucous protests, riots in the streets, commercial boycotts, and armed rebellion – as completely disproportional, extreme, and indeed radical. These historians were convinced that only radicalized Americans supported such drastic measures, and that most Americans were more sober and detached from this political and ideological contest.

This modern understanding of the conflict recasts not only the story of the Revolution, but also of the Revolutionary War. Because 20^th-century historians saw the Patriots as a small minority, they judged the American victory in the war as a colossal (and somewhat baffling) accomplishment. These scholars saw the American victory as a product of extraordinary grit and ingenuity by a dedicated minority, as well as a product of a remarkable campaign of social and physical intimidation by this dedicated minority to keep the majority in line. Moreover, the notion of a small Patriot minority also explains why so many people believe (incorrectly) that the Americans waged a guerrilla war against Britain. Guerrilla warfare – the weapon of the weak – can explain how a beleaguered minority could pull off such a miraculous victory.

Yet local community studies paint a different picture, pointing to strong majorities for the American cause in every colony, which gave the rebels a decisive manpower advantage over the British. These findings support Revolutionary Americans’ real-time understanding of the war, and they present the American victory as foreseeable and conventional, not miraculous. The rebels had an overwhelming advantage in manpower reserves, as well as the political and material support of the population. In a long war, these logistical advantages are often decisive. Whereas Patriots were able to replenish their forces after challenging campaigns, the British could not overcome their manpower losses. Even in successful battles and campaigns, British losses had lasting detrimental effects.

The Americans’ manpower advantage – well above 2 to 1 – explains why they chose to fight a conventional war against Britain, rather than a guerrilla war. It also explains British strategy in the war. British commanders have been criticized by generations of mystified military historians for being overly cautious during the American War. But this caution reflected Britain’s manpower crisis in America. The fact that the British could not draw on American military manpower repeatedly hampered their logistical and tactical operations from the very beginning of the war to the very end, in the East, in the South, and in the West.

These findings about a strong Patriot majority also support Revolutionary Americans’ real-time understanding of the Revolution’s political and ideological meaning. The fact that Patriot support ran so deep and wide – over 50 percent in every state, and as high as 70 percent in some states – indicates that the Revolutionists’ political sensibilities were not radical, but well within the mainstream of Anglo-American thought. The Revolution’s military history – specifically the vast numbers of Americans who fought for independence – reveals that the Revolution was a mass movement of common people; a broad cross-section of American society, not a radical fringe. The settlers believed that their benign imperial government had suddenly become lawless and turned against them. From the top to the bottom of American society, colonists expressed this concern in countless public addresses and private letters, pamphlets, editorials, petitions, remonstrances, sermons, street demonstrations, and election returns. This explains why the American cause had considerable support in Britain as well before the first shots were fired in Lexington (April 19, 1775) – a lawless government was a grave concern for English communities on both sides on the Atlantic.

Because modern historians came to believe that the Patriots were a minority, they have come to portray them as radicals who wanted to overthrow the existing system of government. By contrast, they portray Loyalists as conservative supporters of the status quo. But that is not how Revolutionary Americans saw it in real time. American rebels insisted that they were not radical; they explained to one another and to imperial authorities that were not trying to innovate or change the status quo. They insisted instead that it was the imperial government that was changing the status quo, and that they were trying to preserve the old imperial structure that had allowed English populations to govern themselves locally.

Strong Patriot majorities in each and every state support the rebels’ claim that they were not radical. These numbers reveal that their ideas about self-government were well within the mainstream of English thought, not only in the colonies, but also in Britain.

Who won the war – state militias or the national army?

The Revolutionary War broke out on April 19, 1775, when 70 militiamen confronted 700 British troops in Lexington, Massachusetts. Six years later, major combat operations ended with the surrender of a British army to the Continental Army in Yorktown, Virginia. The contrast between the two types of American troops – the citizen-soldiers of local and state militias, and the professional and uniformed soldiers of the Continental Congress – was meaningful to Americans during the war years, and it has remained meaningful ever since.

Americans who lived through the Revolutionary War overwhelmingly credited the militia for the American victory. But in the 20^th century, American historians transferred the laurels of victory from the militia to the Continental Army. When historians today consider the Revolutionary War, they focus almost exclusively on the national army’s operations and are generally dismissive of the militias.

Militia served local communities in ways that the Continental Army could not – from regional patrols and town defense, to suppressing Loyalist opposition in the towns. This explains why civilians were much more likely to perform their military service in the militia (which they did in vast numbers) than in the Continental Army. As a result, the Continental Army struggled to maintain its numbers and became increasingly populated by socially marginal Americans. Whereas the militia was a representative cross-section of the male citizenry, the Continental Army became home to many men at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder and at the outskirts of society. Because militiamen were locals, whereas Continental troops were strangers from distant states, the towns were more supportive of the militia (with provisions and hospitality) than the Continental Army. State governments too gave funding and provisioning priority to their own militias over the Continental Army.

Beyond serving as combatants alongside the Continental Army in major battles, militiamen also did combat in their localities against Loyalist militias, Indian war bands, and British foraging and raiding parties. The militia was also the key to Patriots’ civic control in countless American towns, which enabled the towns to sustain American forces with provisions and recruits. As important, the militias’ control of the towns denied these valuable resources from the British. The pervasive presence of Patriot militias in the countryside meant that British foraging parties required heavy military protection – a foraging expedition of 50 men became a foraging campaign, with 500 men. This not only limited the range and effectiveness of British foraging, but also strained British manpower allocation.

The British Army moved its operations from the northern colonies to the middle colonies, and from the middle colonies to the South, in search of Loyalist support that could make Britain’s war plans feasible. But Patriot control of local militias in the towns prevented Loyalists from providing meaningful support to the British Army. In 1781 the British government finally comprehended that it would not find Loyalist support in America, and that winning the war without the assistance of the settlers themselves was beyond its financial capabilities.

The clash between Revolutionary Americans and Revolutionary historians on this is stark. The Revolutionary generation saw the militias as the key to their victory in the war, whereas modern historians credit the national army for America’s independence. What explains these dueling assessments is that modern historians are exposed mostly to national armies (through their research in national archives), whereas Revolutionary Americans were exposed mostly to the militia. The vast majority of Americans who fought for independence did the vast majority of their military service in the militia, not the army. Moreover, the fighting force that was visible in the towns, performing military and civic services for local communities, was the militia, not the army.

Additionally, the militia and the army are emblems of two adversarial governing systems that have competed with one another for jurisdiction and authority since the birth of the republic – the state governments and the national government. It is only natural, therefore, that when Americans lived in a decentralized republic with powerful state governments (in the late-18^th and 19^th centuries) they largely judged state militias as the foundation of American victory and American independence. But once the United States transformed (in the 20^th century) into a centralized nation-state, in which state power has receded in the face of Federal power, historians shifted their attention to the national government and largely determined that the national army had won the war.

When did the revolution end?

When students learn about the United States Constitution, they sometimes find it odd that American colonists went to war to safeguard local self-government in the states, created a constitution (the Articles of Confederation) that enshrined the individual sovereignty and independence of each of the thirteen states, but then almost immediately reversed course by adopting a new constitution (the Federal Constitution) that created a strong central government that curtailed the individual sovereignty and independence of the states.

Most US History textbooks explain this by suggesting that the first constitution (the Articles of Confederation) was a wartime placeholder, and as soon as the war was over, Americans completed the task of forming a functioning republican government. Most Revolutionary histories thus devote little attention to the first American constitution that the Revolutionists created for themselves when they won the war. Historians instead race ahead to the second constitution, devoting whole chapters to its construction and features. The story of the Revolution thus ends in 1787-88, with the drafting and ratification of the Federal Constitution. What students and other readers absorb from this storyline is that the American Revolution produced the Federal Union, under which Americans live today.

But the Americans who launched the Revolution did not see the second constitution as a part of their Revolution. When they went to war in 1775, they did not envision and did not want the kind of country described in the Federal Constitution. They clarified multiple times – before, during, and after the Revolution – that they did not want a common government to govern them jointly. They rejected the Albany Plan in 1754, and rejected Parliamentary governance in the 1760s and 70s. They wanted thirteen sovereign and independent states, not a consolidated country. They articulated this vision for the United States in their first constitution, and achieved that goal in 1783, when the war ended. And after the war, they rejected two efforts to change this constitution, when they stared down the Newburgh Conspiracy and ignored the Annapolis Convention.

Only later did a growing number of Americans develop greater expectations from their national government. But even then, ratifying the second constitution was an uphill battle. Despite several compromises and assurances (such as a Bill of Rights), and despite an impressive public-relations campaign, roughly half of Americans opposed the new constitution.

In the decade before the Revolution, advocates of the American cause explained repeatedly that their aim was to preserve the old decentralized imperial structure of “salutary neglect,” which allowed colonies to govern themselves. When they won their war of independence, they enacted this vision with a constitution that formed a loose confederation of self-governing states under a weak and receding central government, with no coercive powers and no taxing powers over the states or within the states. Everything that the Revolutionists wanted to deny the British government before the war, under the imperial constitution, they denied the United States Government under the first American constitution.

When Revolutionary Americans tell the story of the Revolution, it ends in 1783, as a story about a backward-looking movement to resist change and preserve the old order. But when Revolutionary historians tell us the story, it ends in 1787, as a story about a forward-looking Revolution to promote change and create a new system of government for a new nation; and a new nation-state.

Conclusion

Beyond the questions listed above – who fought the war, who won the war, and when did the Revolution end – Revolutionary historians routinely challenge the judgement of Revolutionary Americans. For example, historians have alleged that Americans were moved to rebel by either class conflict, commercial ambitions, national self-determination, white supremacy, slavery, anti-Catholicism, or hunger for land on the western frontiers; whereas the rebels explained that what motivated them was a lawless British government that violated their ancient English liberties. Historians guide their audiences to see the Revolution as a conflict over the growing tax burden imposed on the colonies, even though the Declaration of Independence mentions taxes only once, and never complains about the tax burden; and even though the notorious Tea Act, which ignited the conflict, was not a tax but a tax cut. 

Historians also portray settlers in the trans-Appalachian West as disconnected from the events, concerns, and causes that sparked the Revolution on the eastern seaboard. Yet western communities not only voiced anxiety and alarm regarding news from the East, but sprang into action long before the circle of violence expanded to the West. Historians likewise claim that republicanism had deep roots in colonial America, stretching back for over a century before the Revolution, even though the colonists themselves expressed little discomfort with monarchy before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War (certainly no more so than did Britons across the Atlantic). In fact, they regularly held public displays of gratitude and affection toward King George as late as 1773.

By the same token, historians largely explain the Revolution as a product of English settlers’ incremental transformation into Americans – increasingly different and distant from their mother country. But the settlers themselves did not see their political resistance as upholding uniquely-American values that they had acquired by living in America. They insisted that they were upholding values that they absorbed from their English heritage. They did not express a sense of difference or distance from England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They referred to themselves as English, they took patriotic pride in Britain’s accomplishments on the world stage, and they saw themselves as integral components of a transatlantic British civilization. Even as settlers resisted Parliament’s imperial reforms in the 1760s and ‘70s, they explained their resistance as conventionally-English, and pointed to the fact that the animating ideas of the American Revolution were mainstream beliefs in Britain, just as they were in the colonies.

The fact that Revolutionary historians disagree with Revolutionary Americans on key interpretations of the American Revolution compels modern audiences to decide whom to trust – the historical actors themselves or the historians who study the events after the fact.

The clash between historians and contemporaries is common to every field of history. Historians who find themselves at odds with contemporary eye-witnesses can use an analogy from criminology to explain this clash – many criminal investigators argue that eye-witnesses are not credible witnesses. They point to professional literature that details the credibility gaps in eye-witness testimony, and they therefore try to ignore eye-witnesses as much as possible, relying instead on expert witnesses and forensic data. Yet other investigators do trust eye-witnesses, and juries certainly trust eye-witnesses. It is a genuine methodological divergence in the field of criminal justice.

Analogizing historical investigations to criminal investigations is inappropriate, however. In criminal investigations, the eye-witnesses recall the events from memory; they offer testimony well after the fact. By contrast, the eye-witness testimony that historians encounter was offered in real time by the historical actors – American settlers expressing outrage in 1773-76 over British policies; expressing their gratitude and appreciation for local militias instead of the army during the war and at the moment of victory; and demonstrating with words and deeds (before, during, and after the war) their understanding of the Revolution’s goals and when they were accomplished.

When criminal investigators disagree with eye-witnesses, they charge that people cannot recall things properly after the fact. By contrast, when historians disagree with eye-witnesses, they charge that people cannot understand properly – in real time – what is happening around them, what they are doing, and why they are doing it. People are not credible witnesses about their own lives, ideas, actions, and motivations. They cannot tell how popular a revolutionary movement is, what is happening in the war they are fighting, or when a revolution starts and ends.

Bernard Bailyn, for example, wrote that in real time, the outcome of an event or movement is still up in the air, so people cannot see the event fully, from all sides. Also, people’s experience of an event is necessarily limited to what they themselves experience, so their understanding is based on anecdotes. Plus, people in real time are too personally involved and emotionally invested in the outcome to see things clearly. But the farther the society advances chronologically from a historical event, the historians become more emotionally detached, and they gain more and more information from various sources and perspectives, and certainly from hindsight. Bailyn writes that what historical research reveals is how blind the historical actors were about what was happening around them and to them.[1]

This disagreement about people in the past – whether they are credible witnesses about their own lives, ideas, and motivations – creates a genuine disagreement among historians over the mission of the historian. If people in the past are credible witnesses about their lives, then historians should investigate past societies through the eyes of contemporaries, channeling how they themselves understood their actions and beliefs. But if people in the past are not reliable witnesses, then historians must identify hidden forces and motivations that were at play in real time; forces and motivations that the historical actors were not aware of, but were nevertheless shaping their ideas and actions.

This is a genuine and sincere disagreement, because as Karl Helleiner observed, historians do indeed have greater knowledge about the past than people who lived in that past, thanks to hindsight, perspective, comparative models, and integrated data. But this wealth of data comes at a price. Having a multitude of data-points allows historians to construct a variety of paths and patterns of causation, which makes historians increasingly vulnerable to confirmation bias:

The historian’s understanding of past situations benefits greatly from the fact that he, unlike any contemporary observer, knows a good deal about the subsequent development. It is only in retrospect, if at all, that germinal forces, unnoticed or underestimated at the time, can be seen in their true significance. However, hindsight also has its dangers. Reading history backwards we are easily misled into postulating specific “antecedents” and “early phases” of phenomena which seem to require a long period of gestation; and we are almost inclined to distrust our records if they fail to confirm our expectations.[2]

Because hindsight allows Revolutionary historians to know the end of the story of the American Revolution, they necessarily read history backwards. This moves them – like the drunk searching for his lost wallet only under the streetlamp – to seek, notice, and value only those datapoints that the Revolution illuminates retrospectively. This hindsight is what tempts historians to identify small and trivial things like the Albany Plan of Union, for example, as an important antecedent of the American Revolution; and to dismiss as anecdotal all the colonies’ wholesale rejection of the Albany Plan.

Such historical revision and re-creation began immediately after the Revolutionary War, as historical hindsight in the decades after the Revolution started to reshape wartime accounts and the wartime understanding of the conflict. Wartime narratives of the Revolution became outdated over time, and were thus recast in ways that reflected the circumstances and sensibilities of 19^th-century Americans. These dynamics have intensified in the 20th and 21st centuries, as historians gain even greater hindsight and more data about the Revolution.

Revolutionary historians have more knowledge about the American Revolution than did Revolutionary Americans. But this does not necessarily give historians greater clarity, or better understanding of the Revolution. History consumers do not have to choose between historians’ data about the past and contemporaries’ actual experience of the past, because the two testimonies about the past certainly can complement one another. But when the historians disagree with the historical actors, they compel readers and students to choose; to consider the possibility that perhaps Revolutionary Americans are more credible witnesses – as eye-witnesses – than historians, who wield forensic data as expert witnesses.

[1] Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, 1974), viii-ix.

[2] Karl Helleiner, “The Vital Revolution Reconsidered,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 23:1 (February 1957), 1.